Ghana notes continued

I did not take my digital camera with me to Ghana, because I went with a photographer. Instead, I allowed myself the luxury of taking my granny's 1986 Canon camera, with 2 rolls of Boots film which I had lurking somewhere. Now I realise that my blog will be without colour; the pictures will be posted some time in January, once they're been developed.

*****

Thursday

Whilst sitting, ten of us, around a four foot high pile of golden cocoa pods, I met Mohammed Massahoud, a striking Togoloese man who could speak French. His eyes were delicately and naturally rimmed with a purple smmudge, like make-up. Despite his weathered face and ragged clothes, he was exceptionally handsome.

As he hacked his machete into a pod to bring it into his hands, and then gave it two great whacks, splitting it open and scooping out the seeds and flesh into a basket, we chatted about cocoa farming. Because he and I could speak our own language (‘France-English’, as one of the men in the village called it) I felt like we had something in common. We were able to slip into our own secret world, where things were homely and familiar to me, more so than with the other people who could speak my mother tongue. Maybe it’s because neither of us speak French as our first language, we both take time and understand when the other does not. With English, I hear myself talking as if to a child, berate myself for it, but at the same time know that I must use simple words to be understood.

As the sun got higher in the sky, my ability to sit around this slow-shrinking pile of cocoa pods listening to the delicious thwacking noise of machete-upon-husk dimmed.

“Le soleil va vous tapper,” the Togoloese man said, as if practising his voice scales.

The owner of the farm, a young and incredibly muscular man who said little but did much of the hard labour, ran into the forest and came back minutes later with long slender fronds, 12 foot high. He burrowed their ends into the pile of cocoa and dug others into the ground, building a fortress of shade around me. When he saw that the section of freshly-macheted palm trunk that I was sitting on was damp, he whipped off his dirty string vest, laid a pad of palm leaves down first and then let me have the vest as a cushion. Later on in the morning, he went off into another section of his farm and came back with two bunches of the most wonderful sweet bananas I have ever eaten. This man, it appeared, was rather pleased to have guests on his farm.

The other men helping him on the farm were mostly older, one of them being the recorder, a man with two wives whose job it is to weigh the cocoa and pay the farmers, another being the secretary of the village’s cocoa co-operative. Tomorrow they will go elsewhere to help another farmer, until all the crops are in. On Wednesdays no one goes to the farm. On Tuesday nights, someone will go around the village ringing a bell and announcing what Wednesday’s compulsory communal job will be, and everyone will work on it together.

On the night drive back to the town where we were staying, we passed a small mosque which was lit inside. I saw men in rows kneeling and bowing their heads, and for the second time in the day I felt a kin-ship with something that has nothing to do with my own culture. Senegal has seeped into my life more than I had realised; it has become something comforting to me when I am far away from home.